One inevitable suspect was questioned but set free. “I don’t think anybody’s gunning for me,” said slippery Mickey Cohen, who has more friends among the movie makers than Bugsie ever dreamed of. I accidentally found myself sitting at the table next to Mickey in the Mocambo one night. He had a party of ten that night, including Florabel Muir and her husband, Denny Morrison, plus a guard sitting at each corner with the usual bulge under his coat that denotes the presence of concealed artillery.
I called over the captain. “I refuse to sit next to gangsters.” Florabel turned around. “But they’re not gangsters,” she said.
“They certainly look like gangsters to me,” said I, and was given another table in double time.
Mickey, who was finally sentenced to San Quentin for income-tax evasion, wheedled his way into a friendship with Red Skelton, a sentimental, unpredictable man whom I admire very much. Red was a soft touch for Mickey; lent him money; took him into his home, together with Janet Schneider, a Cohen protégée whom Mickey eventually succeeded in getting onto a Jerry Lewis television show. He tried to sell Red the idea that he should play himself in a movie version of his incredible life story.
Red survived the depression of the thirties as a marathon dancer around Bayonne, New Jersey. He managed to stay on his feet sixty days at one time to win enough money to keep body and soul together, though not very tightly. He worked as a circus clown—his father was one, too—and he’s never lost that quality in his nature, a sympathy for the underdog, an ability to picture all human frailties.
Not that he’s slow with a wisecrack when the magic moment comes. Like the day I went to see him in the hospital soon after the last inauguration. We talked about how much Frank Sinatra had given of himself to stage the inauguration party for the President. “What can Kennedy do to repay Frank, the man who has everything?” I asked.
Red paused to consider that for a moment, then grinned: “He can repeal the Mann Act.”
Red’s an Abraham Lincoln Republican. In fact, he’s one of our country’s foremost experts on our greatest president, and he’s got a Lincoln library that stirs your soul. During a lull in rehearsal at one of his television shows on which I was appearing, we decided to try to convert some of his crew to our brand of politics. We both made stump speeches and got a good round of applause. “I don’t think we changed anybody’s mind,” I said.
“Maybe not,” he answered, “but we gave ’em something to chew on, anyway.”
He begged Gene Fowler to cross the Atlantic as his guest when he opened at the Palladium in the summer of 1951, following Danny Kaye, who was cutting it up all over London town as a buddy of Princess Margaret. Gene, an old Hearst reporter and once editor of the New York American, went along, principally to fend off some of the bites of the sharp-fanged British press. He wrote to me: